Alla Makhrova

The hybrid spatialities of transition : capitalism, legacy and uneven urban economic restructuring

This paper conceptualises post-socialist urban economic geographies through the notion of hybrid spatialities that emerge from the mutual embeddedness of neoliberalism and socialist legacies. While the dismantling of state socialism was a massive moment towards the exacerbation of uneven development, ironically it is the socialist-era spatial legacy that has become the single major differentiating factor for the economic status of cities. This superficial overdetermination, however, masks the root causes of uneven development that must be seen in the logic of capitalism and its attendant practices which subsume legacy, recode its meaning, and recast the formerly equalitarian spaces as an uneven spatial order. The authors argue that the socialist legacy, rather than being an independent carrier of history, has been alienated from its history to become an infrastructure of neoliberalisation, conducive to capitalist process. The paper draws specifically on the experiences of Russia, although its reflections should reverberate much more broadly.

Khimki in Moscow City-region: From ‘Closed City’ to ‘Edge City’?

Many concepts in social sciences sooner or later face ‘trial by geography’ — a consideration of their applicability beyond specific places and contexts, thus allowing these concepts to be either adjusted or rethought. The interest of this chapter is, then, to bring the analysis of post-suburbia from the Western economies into the former ‘Second World’ and to consider to what extent the ideas of ‘edge city’ (Garreau, 1991), ‘post-suburbia’ (Kling et al, 1995) and associated models of urban growth may apply for the latter. To this end we consider urban development and place-making on the periphery of Moscow. The analysis here is particularly based on the case of Khimki — a former Soviet off-limits ‘satellite city’ of Moscow and more recently a fast-growing area featuring many new retail, office and housing development projects right at Moscow’s edge.

Uneven Urban Resilience: The Economic Adjustment and Polarization of Russia’s Cities

The multi-dimensional processes of transition to a market economy have produced a radical rupture to the previous development of Russian cities. Many factors driving urban change under the Soviet system, both ideological and material in nature, have lost their legitimacy or significance under the capitalist regime of accumulation and regulation. Thus, no longer perceived as a purpose-built machine for a meaningful evolution to a fair and egalitarian communist society as before, each city has been exposed to the ideology of the free market and pushed to acquire a new niche in the nexus of global and local capitalist flows. Not all cities have been equally successful in this endeavour. Indeed, under the conditions of general economic disorganization and harsh economic downturn introduced by the poorly performed neoliberal reforms of the early 1990s, different urban regions already began to demonstrate divergent trajectories of economic performance, including severe marginalization and peripheralization by some and more successful adaptation by others. These processes of initial spatial differentiation have become self-perpetuating even under the conditions of ‘restorative’ growth experienced in Russia between 1998 and 2008, as well as the ensuing period of more bumpy economic growth.